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From the Cane Fields to the Lecture Hall: Professors of Caribbean-heritage expose the silent suffering of sugar workers
(Kaieteur News) – Long before they were professors, they were just two Guyanese children watching their fathers leave for work every morning and come back looking more broken every evening.
This was the Guyana of the 1970s to 1990s. The cane fields were a hard and dangerous place. The air was thick with smoke from burning fields. Workers handled chemicals that got into the body and never really left. They worked around heavy machines with little protection. They had no choice but to show up and take the risk. And many of them paid a price that only became clear much later.
Dr. Rita Persaud saw that price up close. Her father gave his working life to the sugar industry. She was still a young girl when he died, a man used up by an industry that never looked back. Dr. Tejroi Naipaul grew up in that same world. His father spent years in the industry too, and Tejroi watched what the job slowly took from him.
Guyanese Canadian Dr. Rita Persaud, PhD.
Both of them eventually left Guyana. They got their education, built careers overseas, and became respected professors. But they never forgot where they came from. And they never stopped thinking about the people still left behind in those fields.
So they went back. They pulled together a team of researchers and asked a simple question that nobody in charge had ever bothered to ask: is this still happening today?
What they found is not pretty.
Guyanese Canadian, Dr Tejroi Naipaul, DBA
Their newly published study, the first of its kind in the whole Caribbean, looked at what life is like for sugar workers in Guyana right now, in 2026. And what it found is that workers are still suffering, and not just in their bodies. They are suffering in their minds too. Workers said the stress of the job follows them home every night. It stops them from sleeping. It causes trouble in their families. And nobody in charge has ever once said sorry or tried to help.
But there is more. Workers told the researchers that they were too afraid to speak up about dangerous conditions. Not because they did not care, but because they had seen what happened to others who tried. Complain and you get ignored. Report an accident and it gets written down and forgotten. Ask for proper safety gear and you get something that barely does the job. Ask for proper training and you get something that has nothing to do with the real work.
“It ain’t just the body that suffering, is the mind too,” said one worker. Those words were so true that the research team used them as the title of the study.
Dr. Jimmy Naipaul, a St Lucian chartered psychologist and co-author of the study, said what the team found was impossible to ignore. “These workers have been carrying this weight quietly for years. What the data shows us is that when people feel unheard and unprotected at work, it takes a real toll on their mental health, and that is something any society should take seriously,” he said.
Dr. Jimmy Naipaul, PhD, a French- based St Lucian chartered psychologist and researcher
All of this is happening while Guyana is booming. Oil money is pouring in. The country is being praised all over the world as one of the fastest growing economies around. Politicians are talking about a bright future. But the men and women who have kept the country’s oldest industry going are still going home every night hurting in ways that nobody wants to talk about.
Dr. Persaud and Dr. Naipaul came back to make sure those people are finally heard. And now, the world is listening. The study is published in the international journal Culture and Psychology.
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Credit to Dr. Persaud, Dr. Tejroi Naipaul, and Dr. Jimmy Naipaul for bringing this home, literally. Now that the world is listening, the follow-through has to be clinical care in the sugar communities, enforceable safety standards, and protection for workers who speak up. The data is finally here. There’s no excuse left to wait another generation.